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If, like me your a slave to the ignorance and intollerance of Michael Atkinson and are stuck with the borked, “censored”, Aussie version of Left4Dead 2 – have hope. As expected, I don’t think Valve has gone to extreme lengths to “lockdown” the censroship of L4D2.

Edit the steam.inf file in notepad (or text editor of your choice) and change the “appID=590” line to “appID=510”.

Go back to the “steamappscommonleft 4 dead 2 demo” folder and run the “left4dead2.exe” file.

You will need to run the game from the exe directly for this hack to work, and steam will report the game as “Left4Dead Dedicated Server” but, despite these, you should have a 100% bona-fide proper version.

Now while this works (and I am grateful that it does) I should never have had to do it. Australia needs a R rating for video games. We are one of the few countries that don’t. And its not about getting raunchy or violent games – its about responsibility. 15 year old children shouldn’t be playing even the censored version of the game – plain and simple. There are many other examples of games which are marketed and sold to 15+ year old children which simply shouldn’t be (Doom 3 for example).

And the fact is we would have an R rating except for the illinformed and rediculous stance that the Office of Film and Literature Classification has taken with video games. Video game classification in Australia is the most strict in the Western World in terms of not having an adult’s rating (R18+). Currently only Michael Atkinson, South Australian Attorney-General opposes the R18 classification introduction and is also blocking the release of a public paper that canvasses the opinion of the Australian public on whether or not an R18 classification should be introduced.

It staggers me that 1 person can get so much power to effect so many people through inaction.

Users of the world’s most common web browser have been advised to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed. Trend Micro reports that over 10,000 sites are already infected, and taking advantage of the vunerability in IE 7.0, the most widely distributed and arguablly the most common web browser today.

“Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer.”

But I can’t help but think that people are over-reacting. Every browser has its various quirks and become susceptible to vulnerabilities from time to time. It’s fine to say ‘don’t use Internet Explorer’ for now, but it’s nieve to think that any specific browser is immune.